27.11.11

Life Drawing Experiments

A series of videos made using my students drawings:

First I set them up encircling the model, evenly spaced, so that the rotation rate would not be too jittery. Each frame is made up of a drawing which would have taken between 10-20 minute to create, using a mixture of charcoal, pastels or whatever else is at hand, so for one person to just create the drawings would take about 5 hours, so the model would probably not survive.

I then photographed each drawing, working my way around the room in sequence, so I could keep track of the order of the drawings and how they are placed in the 360 degree view of the model.

After cleaning up the images a little digitally I then brought them into Aftereffects and lined up any points of reference in the drawing, using a vertical line going (usually) straight through the middle of the head, as the locus of rotation.

By piecing them together, we can see the consistency in the pose over the multiple drawings, what people concentrate on, what is on the periphery. The interesting thing is that even though many of the drawings are quite radically different, in proportions, tone, and colour, our eyes still prefer to view the similarities rather than the differences, and the sequence of drawings feels like one rotating pose.
A video by Aoife Balfe got me thinking about doing something like this a while back: vimeo.com/user5046445

Though attributing a drawing to each person is kind of tricky here is a full list of the Production Design for Stage and Screen Students which participated in these classes: